Transitions: Deconstructing… everything?

As you may know, I’ve been pastor of Skelly Drive Baptist Church for three and a half years now. The stated intent when I was called, by both the church and myself, was to transition the church from what it was into a church more effective at reaching today’s society. You can read more about what I think that church might look like here: IVM.

While the specific form of the church is not the subject of this series of articles, the act of transitioning a church is.

Transitioning anything, especially an organization of people joined around a common perceived purpose, requires some level of deconstruction. You must look at what the systems are, what they intend to produce, what they actually produce and what you want them to produce. Only then will you be able know what to change to get them from one inefficient or misapplied system (if they need change) to the more efficient system.

But the process of deconstruction is a dangerous one. Not everyone, particularly in a church that has it’s own history and exists within the American church culture, is a fan of change or is even capable of it.

And the nature of deconstruction in the collective mind is to explain to everyone why the way they’ve been doing it is WRONG.

That’s the way it is perceived, anyway, and it creates resistance.

All of this begs the question(s): When transitioning, must you deconstruct everything? Must all deconstruction be revealed to the full organization? What is public and what is private?

I’ll leave you to opine on this today (if you will). My thoughts and experiences later.